Auxier, John

ORAL HISTORY OF JOHN AUXIER
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
January 27, 2012
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is January the 27th, 2012, and I am at the home of Dr. John Auxier, here in Oak Ridge. May I call you John?
MR. AUXIER: Yes sir, please.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right John, thank you for taking time to talk to us.
MR. AUXIER: It's my pleasure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let's start at the very beginning. Let's talk about your family - where you were born and raised and something about your family and where you went to school.
MR. AUXIER: I was born in Johnson County, Kentucky. Grew up on a farm on the Big Sandy River.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where is Johnson County, Kentucky?
MR. AUXIER: Eastern end of the state. It's on the Big Sandy River which is 20 miles from the West Virginia border.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: I stayed there until I went into the service. I went into the service in January 1944. Got into the Aviation Cadet Program and became a pilot. Stayed in - went to Alaska for a year down to the Aleutian Islands.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's talk about your being raised a little bit. We'll get to that in a minute. But tell me something about your family. How many brothers and sisters did you have, what did your parents do?
MR. AUXIER: Dad was a railroader - brakeman/conductor on the C&O Railroad. He got sick in 1932 and was out of work for two years. So, we were a pretty poor family on the farm but we always had plenty to eat.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was during the Depression. MR. AUXIER: The worst part of the Depression. But Dad was a great believer in the fact that the only way to keep boys was to keep them so busy that they couldn't get in trouble. So he was good at that. And I have two other brothers and a sister. One brother is two years younger than I am and the sister is six years younger than I am but my baby brother, who was not born until 1940 - in those days they called it a change of life baby and because he was so much younger than the others, he got spoiled rotten. He didn't get raised like the rest of us.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MR. AUXIER: But, we lived a country life in a real sense. And I went to a little two-room schoolhouse in East Point, Kentucky, through the eighth grade. When I graduated from the eighth grade, Dad did not believe in the county high schools in that area so he made me go to Paintsville High School. And he said because of where you went to school you are going to have to take the eighth grade again.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay
MR. AUXIER: Oh that hurt my feelings.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.
MR. AUXIER: But on the other hand, at the end of the first six weeks I had a C in English so I quit complaining.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how far away was that from where you lived?
MR. AUXIER: Seven miles.
MR. MCDANIEL: Seven miles.
MR. AUXIER: And because it was a mile from where dad worked; often he worked the 7:30 - 3:30 shift and we would go with him, or it would cost a quarter to ride the bus, the Greyhound bus. And sometimes we walked. Especially in the evenings we would walk on up the railroad, it was only six miles by railroad.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: But it was, what we consider a very strenuous life. Hard work but I think to this day, that really hard work, toughened us both and really kept us going. I mean I'm eighty six and I can still do things that a lot of younger people can't.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right
MR. AUXIER: And to be that, partly to genetics, partly to toughing it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Just being tough? So you graduated high school in what year?
MR. AUXIER: Well I really didn't. In the middle of my high school year, it was a strange thing. Everybody always talks about the poor schools in eastern Kentucky especially. But beginning of my senior year, I took the two-year college equivalency exam for the Army Air Corps wasn't it?
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And I passed it and so I went into active duty in January '44. My brother, when he graduated two years later, they gave him my diploma as well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh is that right?
MR. AUXIER: Gave me a diploma.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you got your diploma, it's just that you kind of opted out of your senior year and went into Army Air Corps.
MR. AUXIER: Yes, that’s exactly what it was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now where did you go first when you, when you, I'm sure you went to basic training.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah, Keesler Field.
MR. MCDANIEL: And where's that?
MR. AUXIER: Biloxi, Mississippi. Then from there I went to college training detachment at what is now Oklahoma State. It was in those days Oklahoma A&M. Then to college training detachment at San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what year was this? ‘40?
MR. AUXIER: '44.
MR. MCDANIEL: '44. So the war was still going on?
MR. AUXIER: The war was going on but I was so anxious to get in and shoot down those old Japs that it seemed that it was going forever. Then I went up to Oklahoma, to get my primary flight training, to northern Texas up to Perrin Field to my basic, to down near San Antonio for my advanced. Then across town to go to fight gunnery school and about that time, the war ended. As a matter of fact I got my wings within a week of the time that the war ended.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh is that right?
MR. AUXIER: So no combat. But after giving and getting certain training and getting switched around some, I went, got sent up to Alaska. Having had no training in radar, being a second lieutenant, Major gave me, called in one day and said you’re going to have to take these, five enlisted men, you’re going down to Adak in the Aleutians and set up the ground control approach system. Now I did know ground control approach system, I'd been flying that. I was good at that, but I didn't know how the radar worked.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And it would have been impossible except I had one, one of the enlisted men, he was a corporal at the time, was of Chinese origin and was an absolute genius and he had been to Boca Raton for a radar school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: Did a great job, and with him leading us, I'm supposed to be the leader but he was the technical leader, we get this the thing going and we created quite a name for ourselves up there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now so this is, you were probably what 20, 21 at this point?
MR. AUXIER: 21.
MR. MCDANIEL: 21? And here you were in Alaska, a boy from the hills of eastern Kentucky. I bet that was a little different wasn't it?
MR. AUXIER: Yes, we always said that there was a women behind every tree but there wasn't even a bush on the island. But I got to do some flying. I had to do some transferring. Here is a young arrogant P47 pilot who is now flying C47s, "The Gooney Bird" up and down the chain. But after a few weeks, it occurred to me that no other airplane could carry its own weight in ice that we had at that time. Your weather in the Aleutians is admitted to be one of the worse places in the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: So I learned to love the old Gooney Bird.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? So how long where you in the Aleutian islands.
MR. AUXIER: One year.
MR. MCDANIEL: One year and then where did you go? Or were you discharged?
MR. AUXIER: I applied for release from active duty and stayed in the reserve. Came back to McCord Field at Seattle to be separated from the service.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: Came back home, but I had made up my mind. I had got out of the service to specifically go to college.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: I figured with no combat time, I was never going to get anywhere unless I got a leg up somehow.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And I thought, if got a degree in physics it would help me. Turned out I fell in love with science so much that I didn't go back.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: But I had to, I got out in July, but it was too late for the fall term at Berea College, so I actually started in January '48 and graduated June of '51.
MR. MCDANIEL: And Berea?
MR. AUXIER: At Berea.
MR. MCDANIEL: You went to Berea.
MR. AUXIER: As you know it’s been lauded lately as, especially as the greatest bargain in education in the country.
MR. MCDANIEL: And Berea for those of you who don't know is a school where you go and you work.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah, everybody has to work at least ten hours a week. There is no tuition and somebody who wants to work hard can go through school with no money. These days there are various kinds of loans that a lot of folks get. But it’s where you get a solid education and I had much later, appreciated how much more I got there than I knew at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure Exactly. So you graduated in '51 you said.
MR. AUXIER: June of '51. On a Sunday. On Monday I matriculated at Vanderbilt. I had enough G.I. Bill to carry me through the summer. Then I had an AEC Radiological Fellowship, which is a really good one that carried me through the next year. And I got my master’s degree in June of '52 and came directly to ORNL as a part of that fellowship. We were committed to spend a summer in on-the-job-training, which was wonderful.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how did you get the AEC fellowship, what’s that, tell me about that.
MR. AUXIER: Well through my professor at, Dr. Noll, at Berea. I had applied at the University of Indiana and had gotten accepted; I was going to go as a part-time sort of person,-
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: - and work in optical physics. But Dr. Noll came and says ‘Mr.’, I want you to apply for this. And I said what’s Radiological Physics and he said I don't know but it's too good to pass up. He took me to his office. Now 1951 it's time for a college professor to get a student in and make a long distant call to another professor. So he called down to Vanderbilt.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And asked his old friend, the head of the Physics Department there, what is Radiological Physics. And he said I don't know, but the students get to take our straight physics curriculum with an add-on. They have to take an extra one, which counted a quarter and a half a semester and something they call Radiological Physics and they also have to take comparative anatomy and physiology, but that’s added on and they get a straight physics degree.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And he convinced me that I had to do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: That had to do that.
MR. AUXIER: And I applied and by George I got it.
MR. MCDANIEL: You got it? And you went to Vanderbilt to get your Masters and part of that program was coming to the lab at ORNL.
MR. AUXIER: Yes for the summer and that was a great deal.
MR. MCDANIEL: That was in 1952? So the summer of '52. So tell me about coming to Oak Ridge your first time and--
MR. AUXIER: --well the first time to come I came as a student. Worked that summer but while I was here, I got hired by the University of Texas Air Force contract. And they kept me here through January of '53 to conduct some experiments at the old swimming pool reactor, later called the Bulk Shielding Reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But I did those experiments till then, then I went to Austin.
MR. MCDANIEL: But you were working for the University of Texas at the Lab?
MR. AUXIER: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: To do some experiments?
MR. AUXIER: Right. Went down to Austin, did some experiments. Lot of fun. Learned a lot of things but the program was funded by the Air Force and was part of a multipart program to develop nuclear propelled air craft.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: Well I didn't consider myself the brightest star in the world but I knew from what I did know about shielding and scattering of radiation and air and a few other things, I knew that this was not going to, pardon the expression, this was never going to fly.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. AUXIER: And it became apparent to the Air Force within a couple of years. We had to come up to ORNL to do some other experiments at Tower Shielding Reactor but we were radiating monkeys, chimpanzees, rats, rabbits and so forth. Looking at the effect of radiation on these animals. With the monkey being the stand in for the human to see how they could perform as a function of radiation dose. And the monkeys were trained to do things, work lights and pull rods and things. To mimic flying and the airplane and after they were well trained, they got various dosages of radiation to see how they performed. Real quick it became apparent that the monkey was not a good stand in for a man. We had just enough information from accidents to know that man becomes incapacitated increasingly at about 400 rads and as it gets higher, it gets more rapidly incapacitated. The monkeys could take five times what a man could.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh is that right?
MR. AUXIER: And still even though they were kind of incapacitated, instead of reaching up and turning the knobs with their hands, they would lie there and do it with their feet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: Some amazing animals.
MR. MCDANIEL: --why, has it ever been explained why they could take more?
MR. AUXIER: Not really take more, it’s just--
MR. MCDANIEL: The way that they are made.
MR. AUXIER: That’s just the way they are made.
MR. MCDANIEL: And the way they react to it.
MR. AUXIER: There are several cases where we have tried to use animals to stand in for man. For instance the burros that the UTAEC farm used. We took them to Nevada and exposed them to nuclear weapons, shielded from the heat and blast but irradiated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure
MR. AUXIER: The opposite was true there. Shortly after radiation, the burros would start walking slowly in a circle always to the left. We figured in the southern hemisphere they would go to the right. Anyway they'd walk left and of course they would resist a little bit until eventually, where we had them, they'd hit an obstruction on a wall or something. And they'd just stand there and they'd butt, and they’d butt. Obvious central nervous system syndrome.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now was this that research was that done at in Oak Ridge?
MR. AUXIER: In Oak Ridge?
MR. MCDANIEL: They would radiate them?
MR. AUXIER: We would radiate them in both places, we would later radiate them here at the Health Physics Research, which was my favorite. Anyway, it turned out finally an autopsy on these brains they would find out that the burro is a desert animal. The blood system and the brain was that such that it could take the heat in the desert and it had fine capillaries. Fine enough so that it could be disrupted by neutrons, it would only be neutrons that would do this to them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. AUXIER: But anyway, when we look at other animals--
MR. MCDANIEL: --now was that. Sorry I don't mean to interrupt.
MR. AUXIER: It's okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: But was the research, was that part of the CARL lab.
MR. AUXIER: Yes. In those days, before CARL it was called the UTAEC, Agricultural Research Farm.
MR. MCDANIEL: But it was all, it was the same thing just had different names?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah, later on they called it CARL and changed around some. But there was a lot of good work done with some of those people down there. Dan Brown and his crew were very good. They worked with us over a long period of time, later when we had the Heath Physics Research Reactor, they would bring animals up to radiate there. And little side line there is that one of the things we always irradiated just a little bit was hogs. And then twice a year we'd have huge BBQs, down at the Carbide Park. We'd have international and comparative studies.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And irradiation dosimetry, people would come from well, usually limited to like five countries.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: Ten people from around the world. Great time, we learned some stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? My goodness. Well, so you were doing this work for University of Texas, the nuclear air craft.
MR. AUXIER: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: As they call it, and then you went back to Texas to do some work after you did the experiments here in Oak Ridge.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah, I was actually down there for about two years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Were you?
MR. AUXIER: We did a lot of interesting things down there. I had the first, multi-thousand curie or bigger cobalt source outside the control of AEC.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. AUXIER: Whatever it was, we built that. Had a lot of radiation facilities down there. But slowly both the Air Force and the school of aviation medicine, which was funding this, realized looking back that what was going on with the air craft design, reactor design, that this wasn't going to go.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And they started talking about phasing it down so, but in the meantime. Karl Morgan and Sam Hurst and others at ORNL wanted me to come back here. So at the beginning of 1955, as that school down there was moving to San Antonio anyway, I just came back to ORNL.
MR. MCDANIEL: --Came back to ORNL.
MR. AUXIER: First of February '55.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me ask you about the airplane, because I've heard stories about the work that was done on it, you know here. I guess there were a couple things, a couple reasons that it really didn't look like it was going to work out, the things that I've heard are one, to have enough shielding, it was going to make it too heavy, and second, and I'm sure there are others, but secondly, politicians weren't keen on nuclear reactor flying across, over the country.
MR. AUXIER: Well I never considered that, it was just that, first place to build a reactor you had to have two things- you had to have a powerful reactor to all that power, we are talking about the equivalent of thousands of horse power in thrust.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And then to convert that energy into thrust, that was a problem as well. It became apparent that was just not a way to go, as you know the plan got canceled.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly. So okay you came back to Oak Ridge.
MR. AUXIER: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: They talked you in to coming back, and this was in '55.
MR. AUXIER: Yes, the beginning of '55.
MR. MCDANIEL: The beginning of '55. So what did you do? Tell me about your work.
MR. AUXIER: I joined Sam Hurst, Rufus Richie, and these folks as a radiation research, instrumentation researcher. But we also right away, got involved in the Japanese studies. Trying to get what-- I'll give you a little background.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an organization was set up to study the effects; it's called the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. ABCC. They looked at people who were exposed, and they were puzzled, not too puzzled maybe. The fact that some people in real close sometimes had no effects, and people at 1200 meters from ground zero were hit pretty hard.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: It was obviously a shielding problem. The kid that was at 500 meters, that was in the sub-basement of the Fukuya Department Store, he didn't get enough radiation to even count. So anyway, with all that information, the AEC, it was still AEC then, was asked by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission if we could find a way to find out what the doses were. Because the Hiroshima weapon was unique. The Nagasaki weapon, the Fat Man, had been fired again in the Nevada desert, and we could study it real well. The Little Boy, the bomb, over in Hiroshima, was one of a kind as far as bombs ever fired. Therefore we had to study characteristics of bombs in general to try to extrapolate, to see what the radiation emitted from the bomb was, and then what, because the energy distribution, how it varied with distance and shielding.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And that took several years. But the real minds, brains and leaders behind that were Sam Hurst and Rufus Richie. Both of them didn't like to travel. They liked to do their research in the laboratory. They didn't particularly like spending time in the desert. They turned that program over to me. And--
MR. MCDANIEL: Well you were a young man.
MR. AUXIER: That’s right, well they were young too.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were the young--
MR. AUXIER: --As a matter of fact, Sam was a year younger than I was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh was he? Okay.
MR. AUXIER: He went to Berea also.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay.
MR. AUXIER: But he was one of the prodigies. Anyway, they turned the program over to me and so we did the weapons tests, we did lots of studies in Japan. For example you can't figure out why anyone, doesn't matter know what you know about the bomb, you can't get their dose and know exactly where they were and what kind of shielding they had, a whole bunch of parameters like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: How did you, how did you get that information?
MR. AUXIER: That is one of the oddities of human nature. The ABCC set up what they call the shielding group. A bunch of Japanese, technically trained technicians, set up to try to interview people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay.
MR. AUXIER: But I still had some doubts, you know, I ask you where you were at exactly a certain time and when flash boom, when it happened.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: Well so I went with--
MR. MCDANIEL: --but you would think people would know that.
MR. AUXIER: Well it turns out they did.
MR. MCDANIEL: It’s just like where were you when 9/11 happened. Where were you when--
MR. AUXIER: --but this was more dramatic cause it was just a second, anyway I went on interviews with them and, I'll give you one example of why. There was a little lady, older lady. Very small even for Japanese. And we interviewed and she, at the time of bomb, she had been out in the street. In that little area of town, they swept the street and sprinkled it down every day. So she is sweeping and being a good neighbor, is using her hands to sprinkle the street. The black pajama type things, what they called the pompies—pompie. A little child was pulling on those and she was trying to sweep and the bomb went off and she remembered where the child was, where the neighbors’ broom was, and such detail that it flabbergasting.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. AUXIER: I still, of course, wasn't sure that was exactly right, but that’s what she remembered. But then, she and her neighbors, the neighborhood scattered. She had not seen that neighbor. Now the Japanese are not very close to their neighbors because of the privacy problem where they are so jammed up--
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: So we finally found that woman
[PHONE RINGS]
MR. AUXIER: --Gave her the same
MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on a second. We'll just let that ring till it stops.
[PHONE RINGS]
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay so you were looking for the neighbor?
MR. AUXIER: Yes and we found her.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: We interviewed her and it was precisely, exactly like the first woman had described it. She knew where the woman who was sweeping, where her broom was, she knew where her hand was. It was scary, it was so detailed. It was so burned in their memory so much. What they did five minutes later they couldn't remember.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: But that instant they remembered. So we had confidence then that mostly the people remembered. That was, twenty-- eighty thousand to be interview actually--
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really, eighty thousand?--
MR. AUXIER: --actually it ended up about interviewing sixty thousand. Beyond a certain point it turned out it wasn't that good--
MR. MCDANIEL: sixty thousand? So you interviewed sixty thousand?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah and it took them years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: Had a good size bunch of people. But anyway, I had confidence now that we knew where the people were and we had pre-strike photographs and post-strike photographs and block maps, we could reconstruct the city in amazing detail.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: So we had people and where they were and we the information over the bomb and we got to calculate the doses to the people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. AUXIER: That, the first work there got published in 1965.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you did that for, ten years, there abouts?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah I did a lot of other stuff too--
MR. MCDANIEL: --right, right exactly.
MR. AUXIER: Ten years, that was, we called it the Ichiban program. Ichiban in Japanese is a number one. So we considered it a number one program.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what was, you published in '65?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what was the result of that research, I mean what did you learn from that?
MR. AUXIER: Well, the big thing we were out to learn was of course the effect of radiation dose.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And we did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And of course it’s a prompt radiation, what you call a flash dose mostly--
MR. MCDANIEL: --Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And you got a mixture of neutrons, gammas, etc. so there are a lot of other work to be done to separate it, but there are ways of doing that so we spent a lot of time, a lot of -- as a matter of fact, there are people still not done working with it yet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now, now so this was in late 50's, early 60's you were doing this work and what kind of computer did you have to do your calculations?
MR. AUXIER: Well the most, well we used slide rules.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: But at those days we had calculators, the Marchant and the Friden electromechanical calculators. You pushed the buttons and add and subtract.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: That’s all we had and until near the end of it. But by, after 1960 something we began to get some data fed through the ORNL computer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, Right.
MR. AUXIER: But the real bulk of the work was punching it in or read off the slide rule.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. So that was in, you finished that in '65.
MR. AUXIER: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Or that portion of it, that portion of it.
MR. AUXIER: That portion of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what did you do next?
MR. AUXIER: Well during this time--
MR. MCDANIEL: --Yeah, do your other things.
MR. AUXIER: Well one of the other things that happened, if you remember, and I know you do, was the Y-12 accident.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: In that year there were three accidents at Y-12, at Vinca in Yugoslavia, and at Los Alamos.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was at 1958? Is that correct, 1958?
MR. AUXIER: Yes. And so the International Atomic Energy Association established a program with Tito's folks to allow an international team to come in and reset up the reactor, study and get the doses that people got. Now there were seven people that got irradiated in that accident.
MR. MCDANIEL: And where was that?
MR. AUXIER: In Vinca, Yugoslavia. Outside of Belgrade. People that were most seriously exposed were sent to Paris to Dr. Shumay’s Laboratory and they did some bone marrow transplants and one of the people still died. One of our British friends who did think Shumay's work was worth much always said that they all lived in spite of him except one. But anyway we did have these biological effects and the blood activation and sodium and so forth. Therefore, we did get permission to come in, and the French sent a team in to reconstruct the reactors and we were sent in to actually do the experiments. We had one representative from Norway and one from Britain.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And it took a few weeks to get everything going, to get the measurements. That was an extremely interesting thing. We learned a lot about a lot of other things as well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: Interesting side line. Why we were there when the word got out that this international team was there and Tito's staff got the work and so we got an official invitation to come down and have a Slivovitz with Tito. Which we did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: Interesting, we went into this building down this long hallway with title floors so that everybody's heals clicked --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: --and then long tall one, must have been a fifty yards down this thing but had windows every few feet. Standing by each window was a guy, sullen looking guy, with a bulge in his pocket, brown suit, standing at attention. Guards went down, went into a little conference room and had some chitchats with some of the staff, then Tito came in and shook hands and everybody got introduced and then he poured. He had somebody pour the Slivovitz and we all had Slivovitz and then he thanked us and went out. That was the visit.
MR. MCDANIEL: That was the visit?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah, Mary Lou gets a big kick out of that one. Anyway that was one of the things that went down between '65.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. AUXIER: We also in--
MR. MCDANIEL: So a lot of your work at that time anyway was dosing. I mean was measuring the effects of certain dose and things such as that.
MR. AUXIER: Yes, now built in to the experiments for Japan, in fall of 1958, President Eisenhower called a moratorium on the above the ground testing. I'm sure you’re aware but we had some key information that just didn't fit. So I talked to our friend in Washington, in supplying our money from Washington, and we built a fifteen hundred and twenty seven foot tall tower, television tower out in the forward area. We designed and had built the Health Physics Research Reactor, or what became that. They called it the first, at first we called it the fast burst reactor but it was a reactor that small, the core on it was small cylinder that was hanging from the stuff that supported it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: Drove the control rods and all this stuff and hung that on the tower, in a thing on the tower. And we called it our slowed down A Bomb.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And so we could use laboratory instruments and make really defined, and refined instruments.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: That was a lot of fun. Later after the reactor came back, we installed it a facility called the DOSAR Facility at ORNL out in the woods. That’s where I lived till 1972.
MR. MCDANIEL: Where was the tower built you saw?
MR. AUXIER: Out at area three at the Nevada Test Center.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay.
MR. AUXIER: Later it was moved over to Jackass Flats and it's still there.
MR. MCDANIEL: And they brought it back to Oak Ridge?
MR. AUXIER: Brought the reactor back to Oak Ridge?
MR. MCDANIEL: Brought the reactor back to Oak Ridge?
MR. AUXIER: And it's served really well. Over the years, we irradiated everything from amoebas to two thousand pound steers, hogs, rabbits, burros. Everything you can think of, people came from all over the world and brought it there.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was in Oak Ridge. That was out in the valley.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And tell me a little bit about that facility. Tell me something about it, it was round. Was it a round room?
MR. AUXIER: No, no, no, that’s not the one. Not this one. I designed the building, but I didn't design the reactor building per se because it was a big sheet metal barn, with a railroad track in the middle and the reactor was on a positioning device, so it could be moved up and down and moved in and out. And it had a place that you could stick a steel door and put it in, disconnect and shield it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: So you could do anything in the building.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: It had a whole bunch of cables run across the hill, and it was in a little valley with the control buildings was on the other side. And this was a heavily shielded building poured out of concrete. We had like three or four offices and five or six good sized labs where we could do all kinds of experimental work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And we'd have up to twenty-eight, thirty people. We always had a bunch of graduate students. We published at least a dozen master and PhD theses a year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh is that right?
MR. AUXIER: That was a really academically centered organization.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But on the same time--
MR. MCDANIEL: --now did you run the facility?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah that was my job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: It was a job that the other folks didn't want so I was given a free hand. Also the reason--
MR. MCDANIEL: Sometimes those are the best jobs.
MR. AUXIER: --yeah. Well that’s true but one of the reasons that transpired was I had really good liaison with the people in Washington. They had tremendous amount of confidence in me. I did a few little other experiments that, that convinced them that I was the guy that could get the job done.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: So anyway that took until 19-- well until, I guess….
MR. MCDANIEL: '72 you said.
MR. AUXIER: Well, '72 I was transitioning. In '69 Dr. Weinberg called me over this his office one afternoon. My boss, Karl Morgan was going to be retired.
MR. MCDANIEL: Dr. Alvin Weinberg, he was the director at the lab.
MR. AUXIER: Right and Jim Liverman was his associate director and they met with me and we all knew Karl Morgan was going to have to retire on his 65th birthday which was in September of '72.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And they asked me this. What do you think, where would we find good, look for a replacement for Dr. Morgan. And I said there are five of us who are section heads and only two of us have PhDs. And one of them is PhD in physics and he doesn't give a flip about health physics, he's only doing some very fundamental research really good. The other is Stan Auerbach who headed the ecology operation and Stan was really focused on environmental matters. He would have not given the physic program the time of day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. AUXIER: And I said the other three of us do not have PhD's and therefore, as much as it bothers me to say so, I think we have to go outside the Laboratory to find a replacement.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And they thanked me and I went back to DOSAR and in about thirty minutes they gave me another call, come back. I came in and Dr. Weinberg says I want you, were going to keep you on payroll but we want you to go away and come back with a PhD.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: And you can't beat a deal like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: No you can't.
MR. AUXIER: So I called friends that I knew and all the places that had the kind of programs that I wanted and they were eager to get me supposedly. But when I put the proviso on I know what my job's going to be and I know what I need to study.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And they thought they could do it but they weren't that sure. But I called and talked to the head of the nuclear engineering department at Georgia Tech and they said sure.
[Phone Rings]
MR. AUXIER: I'm going to kill this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: And that was, they talked.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was at Georgia Tech?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah, they had talked to me on Thursday afternoon; I made the phone calls on late Thursday afternoon. Friday morning I was in his office when he came in at nine o'clock in nuclear engineering at Georgia Tech.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: Within a half an hour we worked out a curriculum and made them happy and made me happy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh well good.
MR. AUXIER: I matriculated the following Monday.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how old where you when this happened.
MR. AUXIER: Well let’s see, I'll have to calculate.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let’s see that was '69.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah that was in '69 so I would have been 44.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: So I was exactly one calendar year down there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay
MR. AUXIER: Regular term and a summer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But then I came back to ORNL and finished my dissertation work here and defended it in October, November of that year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: At Georgia Tech.
MR. MCDANIEL: So it took a couple years to do everything.
MR. AUXIER: Well it took eighteen months.
MR. MCDANIEL: So it took eighteen months right.
MR. AUXIER: Anyway in the meantime, Dr. Weinberg had said even before I actually got the degree, as soon as I got back in June of '72. He said I'm going to ask Karl, tell him that you’re going to replace him to give him from now till his birthday in September to collect all his books, papers and stuff and get comfortable in leaving.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: That didn't make him comfortable but that’s what happened.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. AUXIER: But we did give him a lot of slack, I've been with him forever we were, it worked out real well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: So then I took over the division at the first of July.
MR. MCDANIEL: And this was the division, what was?
MR. AUXIER: The Health Physics Division.
MR. MCDANIEL: The Health Physics Division.
MR. AUXIER: Was a division of 220 people about half applied keeping the Lab safe and the other half was fundamental research, published more papers than any other division in the Laboratory. A lot of people won't admit that but we did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: I've got a big volume of all the papers published.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And but we were extremely involved internationally, we had people giving papers and organizing conferences in this country and all over Western Europe.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now were you working with ORAU at the time.
MR. AUXIER: ORAU was --
MR. MCDANIEL: Still ORINS wasn't it?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah still ORINS and they were sort of peripheral. We worked closely with them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But most of our connections we were still directly with the division of Biology and Medicine in Washington.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: But it was a time that we were all really active. We're still to this day, all the people involved were really proud of the operation. I've still got two great writing notebooks. Half of them applied and half were research of the pictures of people and their brief bibliography, biography.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how long did you stay there?
MR. AUXIER: Till the end of '82, then I retired and started in the private world.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you did that for about ten years? '72 to '82?
MR. AUXIER: As division director, oh yeah right.
MR. MCDANIEL: As division director. So then at '82 you retired and you went off into the private.
MR. AUXIER: Leaving out a few weeks I was working on, I had one of my clients, Gulf Nuclear that needed an analytic laboratory and consultant in this area. So they gave me, what they funded the beginning of what became, well, the applied research lab, radiological lab out at the end of Bear Creek, west end of Bear Creek. So we got that going, and in about two years IT Corporation bought it and I stayed then with IT. We had an agreement that I would stay with them as long as we were both happy with each other.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: It was a good operation. They moved us to Knoxville. Things went real well with them until they got a new president, somewhere I don't know where in like '91 and I have one terrible weakness. I cannot stand micromanagement. I believe that there are two things that are killing organizations, apathy and micromanagement and micromanagement begets apathy. So we got a new president and he began to call weekly about what everybody was doing, and I said, “Oh, I can't take this”. So, I retired again and started my own company. Now it started out to be just me, I had an office space and a rented space and stuff but the first month I was building $32,000 worth of consultancy and I couldn't handle the paperwork and the business consulting too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: So I hired a business manager who is still with me by the way. Still with the company anyway.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now what was the company called?
MR. AUXIER: Auxier and Associates.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh Okay.
MR. AUXIER: And now we've got up to be I don't know twenty something people now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: And—
MR. MCDANIEL: --where were your offices?
MR. AUXIER: Well the first office is now under the interstate. It was in a building that had already been condemned but the state let us have it until they were going to demolish it to build the interstate. It’s right by Kingston Pike where you go across Kingston Pike on Pellissippi.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh on Pellissippi, yeah sure exactly.
MR. AUXIER: So then we moved to the tower building off of Lovell Road, had a nice building for several years and we got a manager that decided they wanted to double our rent or something so we moved to where we are now. Or where, I keep saying we, but I moved the company there and a couple months ago I sold it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: The folks still keep the name and they want to stop by my office and pay me a small salary as long as I want.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: It still gives me a reason to go by the office every morning.
MR. MCDANIEL: To do something.
MR. AUXIER: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Where are they located now?
MR. AUXIER: And that’s off of Pellissippi, you get off of Old Dutchtown Road.
MR. MCDANIEL: Dutchtown Road, right in there, I understand.
MR. AUXIER: There are a whole bunch of office buildings down there, nice ones.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, exactly. And what, so what was the business? What did you do?
MR. AUXIER: Research. Excuse me…
MR. MCDANIEL: Consulting--
MR. AUXIER: Consulting research. We did most of the problems by the way that we were environmentally oriented.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay
MR. AUXIER: One example, was Cotter corporation, people had a huge area but people around them claimed that they had contaminated them and lawsuits. And we had to do environmental studies and then defend it in court.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: We did a lot of that. About any kind of radiation exploration. We had people involved in accidents. Oh well, TMI already finished that, I still did go up there but I had headed a group on the President’s Commission on TMI, to get the radiation doses for the people in the environment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about TMI, so if people don't know who that is.
MR. AUXIER: Okay, Three Mile [Island]--
MR. MCDANIEL: --oh I see Three Mile--
MR. AUXIER: --Unit two meltdown.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: In '79. And worked on that and was on an oversight safety committee for that, there for a long time. It was a good piece or work getting that done.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh I'm sure.
MR. AUXIER: I don't know, a lot of people may not know this but we had the morning of the accident, a valve. PORV, a valve stuck open and was pumping the water out into the subbasement of the reactor building.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And the reactor was trying its best to shut itself down but the operators got confused and they kept fighting it, fighting it until eventually they won and the reactor lost and it melted half of the core as you may remember.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. AUXIER: Both the President’s Commission and those of us who studied it in more detail later said if everybody in the control room would have gone to sleep at four o'clock that morning there would have --
MR. MCDANIEL: --there would have never been a problem, would there?
MR. AUXIER: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: It would have done exactly what it was supposed to do.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah the reactor was really dry.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure, I'm sure. I guess that was a really tough time. I want to come back to your consultant but I guess that was a tough time with the nuclear industry with the China Syndrome movie coming out and then twelve days later--
MR. AUXIER: The timing was terrible.
MR. MCDANIEL: --Three Mile Island happening. It just the made the public panic over the nuclear didn't it?
MR. AUXIER: That right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now most of the people, of course most the people I talk to are from Oak Ridge that know anything about it, you know, are pretty passionate about, it did exactly what it was supposed to do but the operators, they obviously didn't know what to do. So, anyway.
MR. AUXIER: During all of these years though, one of the good things for me personally was because we worked from coast to coast is I got to fly back and forth all the time and I had the joy of having some wonderful airplanes. And it --
MR. MCDANIEL: --So you flew yourself? You had your own planes?
MR. AUXIER: Oh yeah and the last, one of the last ones I had was a big Cessna 421 C, big twin would go high and go fast and was pressurized. Didn't have to wear a mask. And I think that was the most wonderful airplane ever.
MR. MCDANIEL: That was the old, the old fighter pilot in you wasn't it?
MR. AUXIER: Oh yeah, but you couldn't help it. I had some surgery here a couple years ago and I can't get my medical back. I might could, I really haven't worked that hard at it but I tell the world that I have Mary Lou and she makes up for an airplane.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh there you go, that’s good. So I imagine that your work at the lab for those however many years that you were at the lab, in Health Physics and your radiation dose research and things such as that, put you in, when you decided to leave the lab, but you in a pretty sweet spot to be a consulting work.
MR. AUXIER: Yes, I was in considerable demand.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh I'm sure, and I would imagine that you were one of at least the country’s leading experts in Health Physics.
MR. AUXIER: Well they say I am.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well that, if they say it then you probably won't say it, but other people say that about you. So anyway that good. Well anyway lets kind of go back and take just a few minutes and talk about your personal life in Oak Ridge. From when you first came here to, actually the last time you came here and stayed. Did you, have you always lived in Oak Ridge when you were here?
MR. AUXIER: I lived in Oak Ridge until '77. Then I lived, I had a farm out across the river from the mouth of White Oak Creek. Lived over there till 2004. The--
MR. MCDANIEL: --now were you married at the time?
MR. AUXIER: Yes, I was married but a few years ago I got a divorce.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And I, in the meantime had a home in Tucson, a winter home.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: So my ex-wife lives there, I got the farm. But my little white dog and I just couldn't keep everything up so I sold the farm and moved into a condo in Knoxville and then Mary Lou came into my life and everything, all of sudden went happily right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well good, how long has, how long have you all been together?
MR. AUXIER: Four years, three, well we were married the 3rd of October three years ago. So we are working on number four.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well there you go. You said that you had a story you wanted to tell me about Dr. Weinberg.
MR. AUXIER: Yes, Yes. You know me. Everybody knows that we've got the most brainpower in the world together for the Manhattan Project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: But what a lot of people don't know is that a lot of those individuals were well known as a super genius kind.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: But among those were Alvin Weinberg and Eugene Wigner. And I had the joy of working with -- actually Eugene's on the ORG chart. He worked for me one day week, one week a month because he was interested in the civil defense project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: But I worked for Alvin. I held them both in awe for their brain power.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And I'll give you one example, Dr. Wigner was worried about EMP. The electromagnetic pulse from, remember they fired a bomb over Johnson Island that put the lights out, put out the electrical system in Honolulu.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And he wanted to study that and get it so he could predict what to do to prevent problems. So we put together a three person team, headed by Connie Chester and who is, was a very bright PhD in physics and Kit Holland and Barnes. And so they went to work on it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now tell me who those people are again.
MR. AUXIER: Connie Chester was the lead--
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: Person and Kit Holland and I've forgotten Barnes name for a moment, first name.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: Anyway they traveled around the country, where they could perform various kinds of experiments and things and they worked really hard at it--
MR. MCDANIEL: --Uh huh.
MR. AUXIER: And for two years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: And one afternoon I got a call from Connie saying hey we got the answer, we've got the equations. We got the equation and the sub-equations.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And it just happened that Eugene was here, which he had the only carpeted office in the area we fixed up over medical. So I called him and I said we're going to set it up to brief. I called Dr. Weinberg's secretary and set it up and at 9 o'clock the next morning. And so at 9 o'clock I went by Eugene's and he and I walked down. Elizabeth opened the door for us in Alvin's office and we went in and usual amenities and sat down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But Elizabeth stuck her head in and said Connie's crew got locked in at Y-12, but they are free now and will be here, he said about twenty minutes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: That’s understandable.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: So Alvin said to Eugene, so what are we going to talk about? And Eugene said we, the crew has gotten the answer to the equation but, found the equations to describe EMP.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh huh.
MR. AUXIER: And Alvin nodded and nodded. And he had a little blackboard behind his door, office door. Chalk tray full, little pieces of chalk and Elizabeth had a new box of chalk but he didn't mess with that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: He got a little piece of chalk and he said I guess I'd start to think about Maxwell's equations and wrote an equation. And meantime Eugene had come over and they were standing about this far apart and Eugene said “Hmm”. And he got that same piece of chalk out of Alvin's hand and said, “From hence we'd assume doom, doom, doom”, talking to himself. And he wrote another equation. And Alvin looked at it and said then we'd do this. And he drew it. In five equations they came out with. I'm sitting there with my mouth open--
MR. MCDANIEL: They came out with the answer?
MR. AUXIER: Got the answer, I knew it. In about ten minutes these guys did what three bright people took to two years to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But they did it entirely. That's just one example of the things that they did that kept me in awe at all times.
MR. MCDANIEL: That Weinberg and Wigner were two peas in a pod weren't they?
MR. AUXIER: They were like brothers but I spent a lot more time with Eugene because when he was there that week we would walk up to the cafeteria to eat and we'd talk about things. We played games and we'd try to get him through a door before us, couldn't be done. Anyway, so many things that he could do in his head that people would go off and study these things for long time. They would write papers and when Eugene was thinking he would stand there in front of you and put his hands like this and maybe would close his eyes and his lips would move a little bit. And like we had a little bit of measurement from the Pacific that said there were neutrons out at two thousand, three thousand yards from the bomb.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: From a thermonuclear weapon.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And because of the range of these things it was like two hundred meters, mean free path, means that in about a thousand meters these things were gone, from normal bomb.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But I had been faced with this and I had confidence in the measurements that somebody had made and I was talking to him about it and he said it can't be. Neutrons don't reach out and I said well now remember the bomb goes off, all the air mass in there can interact with the oxygen in close but in a thermonuclear weapon, at the speed of sound we push a mass of this air fast to big distances. And Eugene did this and said well oxygen sixteen is double magic and mumble, mumble, and says your right it can happen. People spent all this time to reach a conclusion that he did in ten seconds.
MR. MCDANIEL: He just sits there and --
MR. AUXIER: just blows your mind away.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what was Weinberg like? That was a good story but what was he like?
MR. AUXIER: He is what I call the ideal kind of scientific leader.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: He picked people to do a job and gave in to them, in my case, a division.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And as long as you did your job right, I mean things when well, he never interfered.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: If you couldn't do your job, you quietly got moved around.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: Very little of that happened because he had really good judgment, he had good associate directors like Liverman, McPherson and these people, who helped pick people. So he, in meantime, was thinking great thoughts and universal thoughts about science, the future, the agroindustrial complex, all these sorts of things. And we were doing, one of the things most divisions, at least in my case, we did our own funding from Washington.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: So the only bad part about that was when the time they came through, ORO, they always milked off a few percent.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. AUXIER: So we were so nearly autonomous but we were still a part of the system and once a year, Alvin Weinberg had every division, had to have a, I forgot what day we called it but an annual review anyway.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And he'd sit in the front row of the auditorium--
MR. MCDANIEL: --auditorium.
MR. AUXIER: And we stood up at the podium in from of him. Most people shaking.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But he was a kind person. I never heard him get after anybody but one but that was neat. And the various research leaders in their divisions got up and made reports.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And the funny thing is that he understood so much that you didn't say and Jake Norfeld, one of our bright guys with theoretical opinion would love to come up with huge equations up there, fill up the screen with equation after equation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: Long and complicated. So he got up there and was doing this and this and said therefore, and he asked for the next slide and Alvin said wait a minute Jake. Back up there, look at that third line up there, isn't that E to the minus. Shouldn't that be a plus? And Jake looked at him and turned white. I mean I couldn't even read the equations that fast.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. AUXIER: As you can tell. I've been awed by both of those guys for their brain power, on the other hand the roles they played in the bigger picture. Like in Alvin managing the lab and Eugene managing various other programs, they were wonders at that. And the last time that I saw Eugene was a Radiation Research meeting in Washington and he and Alvin were both on the stage and Eugene was supposed to give a paper but he was going downhill fast and he couldn't get it to come out right and Alvin came up there beside him and said, I think, Eugene what you mean and then he gave his paper for him.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: And that was the last time I ever saw him. And that was not a good time to see him.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But I loved them both dearly.
MR. MCDANIEL: Weinberg, from I understand, was, I mean, he had these great revelations about the nuclear industry, about things.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah. The Agroindustrial Complex.
MR. MCDANIEL: Like you said he was the big picture guy, you know and he would think of things that no one else thought of.
MR. AUXIER: And of course you know, I guess you know what happened to him. He was pushing very hard for the Molten Salt Reactors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: The guy at the reactor division in, it was still AEC, or maybe not, and was going for the Fast Breeder Reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And they dig a hole out near K-25 to build the reactor but they never got built.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: But they were like that about that and so Alvin got sent on a mission to Washington.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And it was. He just got a really bad deal there, smarter than the people that were giving him trouble.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course that’s the way it usually is.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know.
MR. AUXIER: In my mind about all that raft of genius, there was a bunch of them, Eugene and Weinberg were the two of many and never in the history of mankind will ever again get that much brain power to focus on something. It's the fact that Hitler was exterminating Jews. And some of the most brilliant minds were European Jews that came to this country and really a large of the brains in the Manhattan Project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes in advanced science. You know, you know. Absolutely. Well good is there anything else you want to talk about?
MR. AUXIER: I think I've probably worn out your machine.
MR. MCDANIEL: No, not at all, not at all.
MR. AUXIER: No nothing else I can think of.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right. Well John. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us, we certainly appreciate it.
[END OF INTERVIEW]

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ORAL HISTORY OF JOHN AUXIER
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
January 27, 2012
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is January the 27th, 2012, and I am at the home of Dr. John Auxier, here in Oak Ridge. May I call you John?
MR. AUXIER: Yes sir, please.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right John, thank you for taking time to talk to us.
MR. AUXIER: It's my pleasure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let's start at the very beginning. Let's talk about your family - where you were born and raised and something about your family and where you went to school.
MR. AUXIER: I was born in Johnson County, Kentucky. Grew up on a farm on the Big Sandy River.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where is Johnson County, Kentucky?
MR. AUXIER: Eastern end of the state. It's on the Big Sandy River which is 20 miles from the West Virginia border.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: I stayed there until I went into the service. I went into the service in January 1944. Got into the Aviation Cadet Program and became a pilot. Stayed in - went to Alaska for a year down to the Aleutian Islands.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's talk about your being raised a little bit. We'll get to that in a minute. But tell me something about your family. How many brothers and sisters did you have, what did your parents do?
MR. AUXIER: Dad was a railroader - brakeman/conductor on the C&O Railroad. He got sick in 1932 and was out of work for two years. So, we were a pretty poor family on the farm but we always had plenty to eat.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was during the Depression. MR. AUXIER: The worst part of the Depression. But Dad was a great believer in the fact that the only way to keep boys was to keep them so busy that they couldn't get in trouble. So he was good at that. And I have two other brothers and a sister. One brother is two years younger than I am and the sister is six years younger than I am but my baby brother, who was not born until 1940 - in those days they called it a change of life baby and because he was so much younger than the others, he got spoiled rotten. He didn't get raised like the rest of us.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MR. AUXIER: But, we lived a country life in a real sense. And I went to a little two-room schoolhouse in East Point, Kentucky, through the eighth grade. When I graduated from the eighth grade, Dad did not believe in the county high schools in that area so he made me go to Paintsville High School. And he said because of where you went to school you are going to have to take the eighth grade again.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay
MR. AUXIER: Oh that hurt my feelings.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.
MR. AUXIER: But on the other hand, at the end of the first six weeks I had a C in English so I quit complaining.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how far away was that from where you lived?
MR. AUXIER: Seven miles.
MR. MCDANIEL: Seven miles.
MR. AUXIER: And because it was a mile from where dad worked; often he worked the 7:30 - 3:30 shift and we would go with him, or it would cost a quarter to ride the bus, the Greyhound bus. And sometimes we walked. Especially in the evenings we would walk on up the railroad, it was only six miles by railroad.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: But it was, what we consider a very strenuous life. Hard work but I think to this day, that really hard work, toughened us both and really kept us going. I mean I'm eighty six and I can still do things that a lot of younger people can't.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right
MR. AUXIER: And to be that, partly to genetics, partly to toughing it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Just being tough? So you graduated high school in what year?
MR. AUXIER: Well I really didn't. In the middle of my high school year, it was a strange thing. Everybody always talks about the poor schools in eastern Kentucky especially. But beginning of my senior year, I took the two-year college equivalency exam for the Army Air Corps wasn't it?
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And I passed it and so I went into active duty in January '44. My brother, when he graduated two years later, they gave him my diploma as well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh is that right?
MR. AUXIER: Gave me a diploma.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you got your diploma, it's just that you kind of opted out of your senior year and went into Army Air Corps.
MR. AUXIER: Yes, that’s exactly what it was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now where did you go first when you, when you, I'm sure you went to basic training.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah, Keesler Field.
MR. MCDANIEL: And where's that?
MR. AUXIER: Biloxi, Mississippi. Then from there I went to college training detachment at what is now Oklahoma State. It was in those days Oklahoma A&M. Then to college training detachment at San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what year was this? ‘40?
MR. AUXIER: '44.
MR. MCDANIEL: '44. So the war was still going on?
MR. AUXIER: The war was going on but I was so anxious to get in and shoot down those old Japs that it seemed that it was going forever. Then I went up to Oklahoma, to get my primary flight training, to northern Texas up to Perrin Field to my basic, to down near San Antonio for my advanced. Then across town to go to fight gunnery school and about that time, the war ended. As a matter of fact I got my wings within a week of the time that the war ended.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh is that right?
MR. AUXIER: So no combat. But after giving and getting certain training and getting switched around some, I went, got sent up to Alaska. Having had no training in radar, being a second lieutenant, Major gave me, called in one day and said you’re going to have to take these, five enlisted men, you’re going down to Adak in the Aleutians and set up the ground control approach system. Now I did know ground control approach system, I'd been flying that. I was good at that, but I didn't know how the radar worked.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And it would have been impossible except I had one, one of the enlisted men, he was a corporal at the time, was of Chinese origin and was an absolute genius and he had been to Boca Raton for a radar school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: Did a great job, and with him leading us, I'm supposed to be the leader but he was the technical leader, we get this the thing going and we created quite a name for ourselves up there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now so this is, you were probably what 20, 21 at this point?
MR. AUXIER: 21.
MR. MCDANIEL: 21? And here you were in Alaska, a boy from the hills of eastern Kentucky. I bet that was a little different wasn't it?
MR. AUXIER: Yes, we always said that there was a women behind every tree but there wasn't even a bush on the island. But I got to do some flying. I had to do some transferring. Here is a young arrogant P47 pilot who is now flying C47s, "The Gooney Bird" up and down the chain. But after a few weeks, it occurred to me that no other airplane could carry its own weight in ice that we had at that time. Your weather in the Aleutians is admitted to be one of the worse places in the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: So I learned to love the old Gooney Bird.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? So how long where you in the Aleutian islands.
MR. AUXIER: One year.
MR. MCDANIEL: One year and then where did you go? Or were you discharged?
MR. AUXIER: I applied for release from active duty and stayed in the reserve. Came back to McCord Field at Seattle to be separated from the service.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: Came back home, but I had made up my mind. I had got out of the service to specifically go to college.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: I figured with no combat time, I was never going to get anywhere unless I got a leg up somehow.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And I thought, if got a degree in physics it would help me. Turned out I fell in love with science so much that I didn't go back.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: But I had to, I got out in July, but it was too late for the fall term at Berea College, so I actually started in January '48 and graduated June of '51.
MR. MCDANIEL: And Berea?
MR. AUXIER: At Berea.
MR. MCDANIEL: You went to Berea.
MR. AUXIER: As you know it’s been lauded lately as, especially as the greatest bargain in education in the country.
MR. MCDANIEL: And Berea for those of you who don't know is a school where you go and you work.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah, everybody has to work at least ten hours a week. There is no tuition and somebody who wants to work hard can go through school with no money. These days there are various kinds of loans that a lot of folks get. But it’s where you get a solid education and I had much later, appreciated how much more I got there than I knew at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure Exactly. So you graduated in '51 you said.
MR. AUXIER: June of '51. On a Sunday. On Monday I matriculated at Vanderbilt. I had enough G.I. Bill to carry me through the summer. Then I had an AEC Radiological Fellowship, which is a really good one that carried me through the next year. And I got my master’s degree in June of '52 and came directly to ORNL as a part of that fellowship. We were committed to spend a summer in on-the-job-training, which was wonderful.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how did you get the AEC fellowship, what’s that, tell me about that.
MR. AUXIER: Well through my professor at, Dr. Noll, at Berea. I had applied at the University of Indiana and had gotten accepted; I was going to go as a part-time sort of person,-
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: - and work in optical physics. But Dr. Noll came and says ‘Mr.’, I want you to apply for this. And I said what’s Radiological Physics and he said I don't know but it's too good to pass up. He took me to his office. Now 1951 it's time for a college professor to get a student in and make a long distant call to another professor. So he called down to Vanderbilt.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And asked his old friend, the head of the Physics Department there, what is Radiological Physics. And he said I don't know, but the students get to take our straight physics curriculum with an add-on. They have to take an extra one, which counted a quarter and a half a semester and something they call Radiological Physics and they also have to take comparative anatomy and physiology, but that’s added on and they get a straight physics degree.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And he convinced me that I had to do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: That had to do that.
MR. AUXIER: And I applied and by George I got it.
MR. MCDANIEL: You got it? And you went to Vanderbilt to get your Masters and part of that program was coming to the lab at ORNL.
MR. AUXIER: Yes for the summer and that was a great deal.
MR. MCDANIEL: That was in 1952? So the summer of '52. So tell me about coming to Oak Ridge your first time and--
MR. AUXIER: --well the first time to come I came as a student. Worked that summer but while I was here, I got hired by the University of Texas Air Force contract. And they kept me here through January of '53 to conduct some experiments at the old swimming pool reactor, later called the Bulk Shielding Reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But I did those experiments till then, then I went to Austin.
MR. MCDANIEL: But you were working for the University of Texas at the Lab?
MR. AUXIER: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: To do some experiments?
MR. AUXIER: Right. Went down to Austin, did some experiments. Lot of fun. Learned a lot of things but the program was funded by the Air Force and was part of a multipart program to develop nuclear propelled air craft.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: Well I didn't consider myself the brightest star in the world but I knew from what I did know about shielding and scattering of radiation and air and a few other things, I knew that this was not going to, pardon the expression, this was never going to fly.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. AUXIER: And it became apparent to the Air Force within a couple of years. We had to come up to ORNL to do some other experiments at Tower Shielding Reactor but we were radiating monkeys, chimpanzees, rats, rabbits and so forth. Looking at the effect of radiation on these animals. With the monkey being the stand in for the human to see how they could perform as a function of radiation dose. And the monkeys were trained to do things, work lights and pull rods and things. To mimic flying and the airplane and after they were well trained, they got various dosages of radiation to see how they performed. Real quick it became apparent that the monkey was not a good stand in for a man. We had just enough information from accidents to know that man becomes incapacitated increasingly at about 400 rads and as it gets higher, it gets more rapidly incapacitated. The monkeys could take five times what a man could.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh is that right?
MR. AUXIER: And still even though they were kind of incapacitated, instead of reaching up and turning the knobs with their hands, they would lie there and do it with their feet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: Some amazing animals.
MR. MCDANIEL: --why, has it ever been explained why they could take more?
MR. AUXIER: Not really take more, it’s just--
MR. MCDANIEL: The way that they are made.
MR. AUXIER: That’s just the way they are made.
MR. MCDANIEL: And the way they react to it.
MR. AUXIER: There are several cases where we have tried to use animals to stand in for man. For instance the burros that the UTAEC farm used. We took them to Nevada and exposed them to nuclear weapons, shielded from the heat and blast but irradiated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure
MR. AUXIER: The opposite was true there. Shortly after radiation, the burros would start walking slowly in a circle always to the left. We figured in the southern hemisphere they would go to the right. Anyway they'd walk left and of course they would resist a little bit until eventually, where we had them, they'd hit an obstruction on a wall or something. And they'd just stand there and they'd butt, and they’d butt. Obvious central nervous system syndrome.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now was this that research was that done at in Oak Ridge?
MR. AUXIER: In Oak Ridge?
MR. MCDANIEL: They would radiate them?
MR. AUXIER: We would radiate them in both places, we would later radiate them here at the Health Physics Research, which was my favorite. Anyway, it turned out finally an autopsy on these brains they would find out that the burro is a desert animal. The blood system and the brain was that such that it could take the heat in the desert and it had fine capillaries. Fine enough so that it could be disrupted by neutrons, it would only be neutrons that would do this to them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. AUXIER: But anyway, when we look at other animals--
MR. MCDANIEL: --now was that. Sorry I don't mean to interrupt.
MR. AUXIER: It's okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: But was the research, was that part of the CARL lab.
MR. AUXIER: Yes. In those days, before CARL it was called the UTAEC, Agricultural Research Farm.
MR. MCDANIEL: But it was all, it was the same thing just had different names?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah, later on they called it CARL and changed around some. But there was a lot of good work done with some of those people down there. Dan Brown and his crew were very good. They worked with us over a long period of time, later when we had the Heath Physics Research Reactor, they would bring animals up to radiate there. And little side line there is that one of the things we always irradiated just a little bit was hogs. And then twice a year we'd have huge BBQs, down at the Carbide Park. We'd have international and comparative studies.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And irradiation dosimetry, people would come from well, usually limited to like five countries.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: Ten people from around the world. Great time, we learned some stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? My goodness. Well, so you were doing this work for University of Texas, the nuclear air craft.
MR. AUXIER: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: As they call it, and then you went back to Texas to do some work after you did the experiments here in Oak Ridge.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah, I was actually down there for about two years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Were you?
MR. AUXIER: We did a lot of interesting things down there. I had the first, multi-thousand curie or bigger cobalt source outside the control of AEC.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. AUXIER: Whatever it was, we built that. Had a lot of radiation facilities down there. But slowly both the Air Force and the school of aviation medicine, which was funding this, realized looking back that what was going on with the air craft design, reactor design, that this wasn't going to go.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And they started talking about phasing it down so, but in the meantime. Karl Morgan and Sam Hurst and others at ORNL wanted me to come back here. So at the beginning of 1955, as that school down there was moving to San Antonio anyway, I just came back to ORNL.
MR. MCDANIEL: --Came back to ORNL.
MR. AUXIER: First of February '55.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me ask you about the airplane, because I've heard stories about the work that was done on it, you know here. I guess there were a couple things, a couple reasons that it really didn't look like it was going to work out, the things that I've heard are one, to have enough shielding, it was going to make it too heavy, and second, and I'm sure there are others, but secondly, politicians weren't keen on nuclear reactor flying across, over the country.
MR. AUXIER: Well I never considered that, it was just that, first place to build a reactor you had to have two things- you had to have a powerful reactor to all that power, we are talking about the equivalent of thousands of horse power in thrust.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And then to convert that energy into thrust, that was a problem as well. It became apparent that was just not a way to go, as you know the plan got canceled.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly. So okay you came back to Oak Ridge.
MR. AUXIER: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: They talked you in to coming back, and this was in '55.
MR. AUXIER: Yes, the beginning of '55.
MR. MCDANIEL: The beginning of '55. So what did you do? Tell me about your work.
MR. AUXIER: I joined Sam Hurst, Rufus Richie, and these folks as a radiation research, instrumentation researcher. But we also right away, got involved in the Japanese studies. Trying to get what-- I'll give you a little background.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an organization was set up to study the effects; it's called the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. ABCC. They looked at people who were exposed, and they were puzzled, not too puzzled maybe. The fact that some people in real close sometimes had no effects, and people at 1200 meters from ground zero were hit pretty hard.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: It was obviously a shielding problem. The kid that was at 500 meters, that was in the sub-basement of the Fukuya Department Store, he didn't get enough radiation to even count. So anyway, with all that information, the AEC, it was still AEC then, was asked by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission if we could find a way to find out what the doses were. Because the Hiroshima weapon was unique. The Nagasaki weapon, the Fat Man, had been fired again in the Nevada desert, and we could study it real well. The Little Boy, the bomb, over in Hiroshima, was one of a kind as far as bombs ever fired. Therefore we had to study characteristics of bombs in general to try to extrapolate, to see what the radiation emitted from the bomb was, and then what, because the energy distribution, how it varied with distance and shielding.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And that took several years. But the real minds, brains and leaders behind that were Sam Hurst and Rufus Richie. Both of them didn't like to travel. They liked to do their research in the laboratory. They didn't particularly like spending time in the desert. They turned that program over to me. And--
MR. MCDANIEL: Well you were a young man.
MR. AUXIER: That’s right, well they were young too.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were the young--
MR. AUXIER: --As a matter of fact, Sam was a year younger than I was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh was he? Okay.
MR. AUXIER: He went to Berea also.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay.
MR. AUXIER: But he was one of the prodigies. Anyway, they turned the program over to me and so we did the weapons tests, we did lots of studies in Japan. For example you can't figure out why anyone, doesn't matter know what you know about the bomb, you can't get their dose and know exactly where they were and what kind of shielding they had, a whole bunch of parameters like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: How did you, how did you get that information?
MR. AUXIER: That is one of the oddities of human nature. The ABCC set up what they call the shielding group. A bunch of Japanese, technically trained technicians, set up to try to interview people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay.
MR. AUXIER: But I still had some doubts, you know, I ask you where you were at exactly a certain time and when flash boom, when it happened.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: Well so I went with--
MR. MCDANIEL: --but you would think people would know that.
MR. AUXIER: Well it turns out they did.
MR. MCDANIEL: It’s just like where were you when 9/11 happened. Where were you when--
MR. AUXIER: --but this was more dramatic cause it was just a second, anyway I went on interviews with them and, I'll give you one example of why. There was a little lady, older lady. Very small even for Japanese. And we interviewed and she, at the time of bomb, she had been out in the street. In that little area of town, they swept the street and sprinkled it down every day. So she is sweeping and being a good neighbor, is using her hands to sprinkle the street. The black pajama type things, what they called the pompies—pompie. A little child was pulling on those and she was trying to sweep and the bomb went off and she remembered where the child was, where the neighbors’ broom was, and such detail that it flabbergasting.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. AUXIER: I still, of course, wasn't sure that was exactly right, but that’s what she remembered. But then, she and her neighbors, the neighborhood scattered. She had not seen that neighbor. Now the Japanese are not very close to their neighbors because of the privacy problem where they are so jammed up--
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: So we finally found that woman
[PHONE RINGS]
MR. AUXIER: --Gave her the same
MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on a second. We'll just let that ring till it stops.
[PHONE RINGS]
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay so you were looking for the neighbor?
MR. AUXIER: Yes and we found her.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: We interviewed her and it was precisely, exactly like the first woman had described it. She knew where the woman who was sweeping, where her broom was, she knew where her hand was. It was scary, it was so detailed. It was so burned in their memory so much. What they did five minutes later they couldn't remember.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: But that instant they remembered. So we had confidence then that mostly the people remembered. That was, twenty-- eighty thousand to be interview actually--
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really, eighty thousand?--
MR. AUXIER: --actually it ended up about interviewing sixty thousand. Beyond a certain point it turned out it wasn't that good--
MR. MCDANIEL: sixty thousand? So you interviewed sixty thousand?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah and it took them years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: Had a good size bunch of people. But anyway, I had confidence now that we knew where the people were and we had pre-strike photographs and post-strike photographs and block maps, we could reconstruct the city in amazing detail.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: So we had people and where they were and we the information over the bomb and we got to calculate the doses to the people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. AUXIER: That, the first work there got published in 1965.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you did that for, ten years, there abouts?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah I did a lot of other stuff too--
MR. MCDANIEL: --right, right exactly.
MR. AUXIER: Ten years, that was, we called it the Ichiban program. Ichiban in Japanese is a number one. So we considered it a number one program.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what was, you published in '65?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what was the result of that research, I mean what did you learn from that?
MR. AUXIER: Well, the big thing we were out to learn was of course the effect of radiation dose.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And we did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And of course it’s a prompt radiation, what you call a flash dose mostly--
MR. MCDANIEL: --Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And you got a mixture of neutrons, gammas, etc. so there are a lot of other work to be done to separate it, but there are ways of doing that so we spent a lot of time, a lot of -- as a matter of fact, there are people still not done working with it yet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now, now so this was in late 50's, early 60's you were doing this work and what kind of computer did you have to do your calculations?
MR. AUXIER: Well the most, well we used slide rules.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: But at those days we had calculators, the Marchant and the Friden electromechanical calculators. You pushed the buttons and add and subtract.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: That’s all we had and until near the end of it. But by, after 1960 something we began to get some data fed through the ORNL computer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, Right.
MR. AUXIER: But the real bulk of the work was punching it in or read off the slide rule.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. So that was in, you finished that in '65.
MR. AUXIER: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Or that portion of it, that portion of it.
MR. AUXIER: That portion of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what did you do next?
MR. AUXIER: Well during this time--
MR. MCDANIEL: --Yeah, do your other things.
MR. AUXIER: Well one of the other things that happened, if you remember, and I know you do, was the Y-12 accident.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: In that year there were three accidents at Y-12, at Vinca in Yugoslavia, and at Los Alamos.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was at 1958? Is that correct, 1958?
MR. AUXIER: Yes. And so the International Atomic Energy Association established a program with Tito's folks to allow an international team to come in and reset up the reactor, study and get the doses that people got. Now there were seven people that got irradiated in that accident.
MR. MCDANIEL: And where was that?
MR. AUXIER: In Vinca, Yugoslavia. Outside of Belgrade. People that were most seriously exposed were sent to Paris to Dr. Shumay’s Laboratory and they did some bone marrow transplants and one of the people still died. One of our British friends who did think Shumay's work was worth much always said that they all lived in spite of him except one. But anyway we did have these biological effects and the blood activation and sodium and so forth. Therefore, we did get permission to come in, and the French sent a team in to reconstruct the reactors and we were sent in to actually do the experiments. We had one representative from Norway and one from Britain.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And it took a few weeks to get everything going, to get the measurements. That was an extremely interesting thing. We learned a lot about a lot of other things as well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: Interesting side line. Why we were there when the word got out that this international team was there and Tito's staff got the work and so we got an official invitation to come down and have a Slivovitz with Tito. Which we did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: Interesting, we went into this building down this long hallway with title floors so that everybody's heals clicked --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: --and then long tall one, must have been a fifty yards down this thing but had windows every few feet. Standing by each window was a guy, sullen looking guy, with a bulge in his pocket, brown suit, standing at attention. Guards went down, went into a little conference room and had some chitchats with some of the staff, then Tito came in and shook hands and everybody got introduced and then he poured. He had somebody pour the Slivovitz and we all had Slivovitz and then he thanked us and went out. That was the visit.
MR. MCDANIEL: That was the visit?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah, Mary Lou gets a big kick out of that one. Anyway that was one of the things that went down between '65.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. AUXIER: We also in--
MR. MCDANIEL: So a lot of your work at that time anyway was dosing. I mean was measuring the effects of certain dose and things such as that.
MR. AUXIER: Yes, now built in to the experiments for Japan, in fall of 1958, President Eisenhower called a moratorium on the above the ground testing. I'm sure you’re aware but we had some key information that just didn't fit. So I talked to our friend in Washington, in supplying our money from Washington, and we built a fifteen hundred and twenty seven foot tall tower, television tower out in the forward area. We designed and had built the Health Physics Research Reactor, or what became that. They called it the first, at first we called it the fast burst reactor but it was a reactor that small, the core on it was small cylinder that was hanging from the stuff that supported it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: Drove the control rods and all this stuff and hung that on the tower, in a thing on the tower. And we called it our slowed down A Bomb.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And so we could use laboratory instruments and make really defined, and refined instruments.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: That was a lot of fun. Later after the reactor came back, we installed it a facility called the DOSAR Facility at ORNL out in the woods. That’s where I lived till 1972.
MR. MCDANIEL: Where was the tower built you saw?
MR. AUXIER: Out at area three at the Nevada Test Center.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay.
MR. AUXIER: Later it was moved over to Jackass Flats and it's still there.
MR. MCDANIEL: And they brought it back to Oak Ridge?
MR. AUXIER: Brought the reactor back to Oak Ridge?
MR. MCDANIEL: Brought the reactor back to Oak Ridge?
MR. AUXIER: And it's served really well. Over the years, we irradiated everything from amoebas to two thousand pound steers, hogs, rabbits, burros. Everything you can think of, people came from all over the world and brought it there.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was in Oak Ridge. That was out in the valley.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And tell me a little bit about that facility. Tell me something about it, it was round. Was it a round room?
MR. AUXIER: No, no, no, that’s not the one. Not this one. I designed the building, but I didn't design the reactor building per se because it was a big sheet metal barn, with a railroad track in the middle and the reactor was on a positioning device, so it could be moved up and down and moved in and out. And it had a place that you could stick a steel door and put it in, disconnect and shield it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: So you could do anything in the building.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: It had a whole bunch of cables run across the hill, and it was in a little valley with the control buildings was on the other side. And this was a heavily shielded building poured out of concrete. We had like three or four offices and five or six good sized labs where we could do all kinds of experimental work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And we'd have up to twenty-eight, thirty people. We always had a bunch of graduate students. We published at least a dozen master and PhD theses a year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh is that right?
MR. AUXIER: That was a really academically centered organization.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But on the same time--
MR. MCDANIEL: --now did you run the facility?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah that was my job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: It was a job that the other folks didn't want so I was given a free hand. Also the reason--
MR. MCDANIEL: Sometimes those are the best jobs.
MR. AUXIER: --yeah. Well that’s true but one of the reasons that transpired was I had really good liaison with the people in Washington. They had tremendous amount of confidence in me. I did a few little other experiments that, that convinced them that I was the guy that could get the job done.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: So anyway that took until 19-- well until, I guess….
MR. MCDANIEL: '72 you said.
MR. AUXIER: Well, '72 I was transitioning. In '69 Dr. Weinberg called me over this his office one afternoon. My boss, Karl Morgan was going to be retired.
MR. MCDANIEL: Dr. Alvin Weinberg, he was the director at the lab.
MR. AUXIER: Right and Jim Liverman was his associate director and they met with me and we all knew Karl Morgan was going to have to retire on his 65th birthday which was in September of '72.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And they asked me this. What do you think, where would we find good, look for a replacement for Dr. Morgan. And I said there are five of us who are section heads and only two of us have PhDs. And one of them is PhD in physics and he doesn't give a flip about health physics, he's only doing some very fundamental research really good. The other is Stan Auerbach who headed the ecology operation and Stan was really focused on environmental matters. He would have not given the physic program the time of day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. AUXIER: And I said the other three of us do not have PhD's and therefore, as much as it bothers me to say so, I think we have to go outside the Laboratory to find a replacement.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And they thanked me and I went back to DOSAR and in about thirty minutes they gave me another call, come back. I came in and Dr. Weinberg says I want you, were going to keep you on payroll but we want you to go away and come back with a PhD.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: And you can't beat a deal like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: No you can't.
MR. AUXIER: So I called friends that I knew and all the places that had the kind of programs that I wanted and they were eager to get me supposedly. But when I put the proviso on I know what my job's going to be and I know what I need to study.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And they thought they could do it but they weren't that sure. But I called and talked to the head of the nuclear engineering department at Georgia Tech and they said sure.
[Phone Rings]
MR. AUXIER: I'm going to kill this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: And that was, they talked.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was at Georgia Tech?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah, they had talked to me on Thursday afternoon; I made the phone calls on late Thursday afternoon. Friday morning I was in his office when he came in at nine o'clock in nuclear engineering at Georgia Tech.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: Within a half an hour we worked out a curriculum and made them happy and made me happy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh well good.
MR. AUXIER: I matriculated the following Monday.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how old where you when this happened.
MR. AUXIER: Well let’s see, I'll have to calculate.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let’s see that was '69.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah that was in '69 so I would have been 44.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: So I was exactly one calendar year down there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay
MR. AUXIER: Regular term and a summer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But then I came back to ORNL and finished my dissertation work here and defended it in October, November of that year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: At Georgia Tech.
MR. MCDANIEL: So it took a couple years to do everything.
MR. AUXIER: Well it took eighteen months.
MR. MCDANIEL: So it took eighteen months right.
MR. AUXIER: Anyway in the meantime, Dr. Weinberg had said even before I actually got the degree, as soon as I got back in June of '72. He said I'm going to ask Karl, tell him that you’re going to replace him to give him from now till his birthday in September to collect all his books, papers and stuff and get comfortable in leaving.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: That didn't make him comfortable but that’s what happened.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. AUXIER: But we did give him a lot of slack, I've been with him forever we were, it worked out real well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: So then I took over the division at the first of July.
MR. MCDANIEL: And this was the division, what was?
MR. AUXIER: The Health Physics Division.
MR. MCDANIEL: The Health Physics Division.
MR. AUXIER: Was a division of 220 people about half applied keeping the Lab safe and the other half was fundamental research, published more papers than any other division in the Laboratory. A lot of people won't admit that but we did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: I've got a big volume of all the papers published.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And but we were extremely involved internationally, we had people giving papers and organizing conferences in this country and all over Western Europe.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now were you working with ORAU at the time.
MR. AUXIER: ORAU was --
MR. MCDANIEL: Still ORINS wasn't it?
MR. AUXIER: Yeah still ORINS and they were sort of peripheral. We worked closely with them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But most of our connections we were still directly with the division of Biology and Medicine in Washington.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: But it was a time that we were all really active. We're still to this day, all the people involved were really proud of the operation. I've still got two great writing notebooks. Half of them applied and half were research of the pictures of people and their brief bibliography, biography.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how long did you stay there?
MR. AUXIER: Till the end of '82, then I retired and started in the private world.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you did that for about ten years? '72 to '82?
MR. AUXIER: As division director, oh yeah right.
MR. MCDANIEL: As division director. So then at '82 you retired and you went off into the private.
MR. AUXIER: Leaving out a few weeks I was working on, I had one of my clients, Gulf Nuclear that needed an analytic laboratory and consultant in this area. So they gave me, what they funded the beginning of what became, well, the applied research lab, radiological lab out at the end of Bear Creek, west end of Bear Creek. So we got that going, and in about two years IT Corporation bought it and I stayed then with IT. We had an agreement that I would stay with them as long as we were both happy with each other.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: It was a good operation. They moved us to Knoxville. Things went real well with them until they got a new president, somewhere I don't know where in like '91 and I have one terrible weakness. I cannot stand micromanagement. I believe that there are two things that are killing organizations, apathy and micromanagement and micromanagement begets apathy. So we got a new president and he began to call weekly about what everybody was doing, and I said, “Oh, I can't take this”. So, I retired again and started my own company. Now it started out to be just me, I had an office space and a rented space and stuff but the first month I was building $32,000 worth of consultancy and I couldn't handle the paperwork and the business consulting too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: So I hired a business manager who is still with me by the way. Still with the company anyway.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now what was the company called?
MR. AUXIER: Auxier and Associates.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh Okay.
MR. AUXIER: And now we've got up to be I don't know twenty something people now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: And—
MR. MCDANIEL: --where were your offices?
MR. AUXIER: Well the first office is now under the interstate. It was in a building that had already been condemned but the state let us have it until they were going to demolish it to build the interstate. It’s right by Kingston Pike where you go across Kingston Pike on Pellissippi.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh on Pellissippi, yeah sure exactly.
MR. AUXIER: So then we moved to the tower building off of Lovell Road, had a nice building for several years and we got a manager that decided they wanted to double our rent or something so we moved to where we are now. Or where, I keep saying we, but I moved the company there and a couple months ago I sold it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: The folks still keep the name and they want to stop by my office and pay me a small salary as long as I want.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: It still gives me a reason to go by the office every morning.
MR. MCDANIEL: To do something.
MR. AUXIER: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Where are they located now?
MR. AUXIER: And that’s off of Pellissippi, you get off of Old Dutchtown Road.
MR. MCDANIEL: Dutchtown Road, right in there, I understand.
MR. AUXIER: There are a whole bunch of office buildings down there, nice ones.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, exactly. And what, so what was the business? What did you do?
MR. AUXIER: Research. Excuse me…
MR. MCDANIEL: Consulting--
MR. AUXIER: Consulting research. We did most of the problems by the way that we were environmentally oriented.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay
MR. AUXIER: One example, was Cotter corporation, people had a huge area but people around them claimed that they had contaminated them and lawsuits. And we had to do environmental studies and then defend it in court.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: We did a lot of that. About any kind of radiation exploration. We had people involved in accidents. Oh well, TMI already finished that, I still did go up there but I had headed a group on the President’s Commission on TMI, to get the radiation doses for the people in the environment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about TMI, so if people don't know who that is.
MR. AUXIER: Okay, Three Mile [Island]--
MR. MCDANIEL: --oh I see Three Mile--
MR. AUXIER: --Unit two meltdown.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: In '79. And worked on that and was on an oversight safety committee for that, there for a long time. It was a good piece or work getting that done.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh I'm sure.
MR. AUXIER: I don't know, a lot of people may not know this but we had the morning of the accident, a valve. PORV, a valve stuck open and was pumping the water out into the subbasement of the reactor building.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And the reactor was trying its best to shut itself down but the operators got confused and they kept fighting it, fighting it until eventually they won and the reactor lost and it melted half of the core as you may remember.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. AUXIER: Both the President’s Commission and those of us who studied it in more detail later said if everybody in the control room would have gone to sleep at four o'clock that morning there would have --
MR. MCDANIEL: --there would have never been a problem, would there?
MR. AUXIER: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: It would have done exactly what it was supposed to do.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah the reactor was really dry.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure, I'm sure. I guess that was a really tough time. I want to come back to your consultant but I guess that was a tough time with the nuclear industry with the China Syndrome movie coming out and then twelve days later--
MR. AUXIER: The timing was terrible.
MR. MCDANIEL: --Three Mile Island happening. It just the made the public panic over the nuclear didn't it?
MR. AUXIER: That right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now most of the people, of course most the people I talk to are from Oak Ridge that know anything about it, you know, are pretty passionate about, it did exactly what it was supposed to do but the operators, they obviously didn't know what to do. So, anyway.
MR. AUXIER: During all of these years though, one of the good things for me personally was because we worked from coast to coast is I got to fly back and forth all the time and I had the joy of having some wonderful airplanes. And it --
MR. MCDANIEL: --So you flew yourself? You had your own planes?
MR. AUXIER: Oh yeah and the last, one of the last ones I had was a big Cessna 421 C, big twin would go high and go fast and was pressurized. Didn't have to wear a mask. And I think that was the most wonderful airplane ever.
MR. MCDANIEL: That was the old, the old fighter pilot in you wasn't it?
MR. AUXIER: Oh yeah, but you couldn't help it. I had some surgery here a couple years ago and I can't get my medical back. I might could, I really haven't worked that hard at it but I tell the world that I have Mary Lou and she makes up for an airplane.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh there you go, that’s good. So I imagine that your work at the lab for those however many years that you were at the lab, in Health Physics and your radiation dose research and things such as that, put you in, when you decided to leave the lab, but you in a pretty sweet spot to be a consulting work.
MR. AUXIER: Yes, I was in considerable demand.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh I'm sure, and I would imagine that you were one of at least the country’s leading experts in Health Physics.
MR. AUXIER: Well they say I am.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well that, if they say it then you probably won't say it, but other people say that about you. So anyway that good. Well anyway lets kind of go back and take just a few minutes and talk about your personal life in Oak Ridge. From when you first came here to, actually the last time you came here and stayed. Did you, have you always lived in Oak Ridge when you were here?
MR. AUXIER: I lived in Oak Ridge until '77. Then I lived, I had a farm out across the river from the mouth of White Oak Creek. Lived over there till 2004. The--
MR. MCDANIEL: --now were you married at the time?
MR. AUXIER: Yes, I was married but a few years ago I got a divorce.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And I, in the meantime had a home in Tucson, a winter home.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: So my ex-wife lives there, I got the farm. But my little white dog and I just couldn't keep everything up so I sold the farm and moved into a condo in Knoxville and then Mary Lou came into my life and everything, all of sudden went happily right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well good, how long has, how long have you all been together?
MR. AUXIER: Four years, three, well we were married the 3rd of October three years ago. So we are working on number four.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well there you go. You said that you had a story you wanted to tell me about Dr. Weinberg.
MR. AUXIER: Yes, Yes. You know me. Everybody knows that we've got the most brainpower in the world together for the Manhattan Project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: But what a lot of people don't know is that a lot of those individuals were well known as a super genius kind.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: But among those were Alvin Weinberg and Eugene Wigner. And I had the joy of working with -- actually Eugene's on the ORG chart. He worked for me one day week, one week a month because he was interested in the civil defense project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: But I worked for Alvin. I held them both in awe for their brain power.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And I'll give you one example, Dr. Wigner was worried about EMP. The electromagnetic pulse from, remember they fired a bomb over Johnson Island that put the lights out, put out the electrical system in Honolulu.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And he wanted to study that and get it so he could predict what to do to prevent problems. So we put together a three person team, headed by Connie Chester and who is, was a very bright PhD in physics and Kit Holland and Barnes. And so they went to work on it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now tell me who those people are again.
MR. AUXIER: Connie Chester was the lead--
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: Person and Kit Holland and I've forgotten Barnes name for a moment, first name.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: Anyway they traveled around the country, where they could perform various kinds of experiments and things and they worked really hard at it--
MR. MCDANIEL: --Uh huh.
MR. AUXIER: And for two years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: And one afternoon I got a call from Connie saying hey we got the answer, we've got the equations. We got the equation and the sub-equations.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And it just happened that Eugene was here, which he had the only carpeted office in the area we fixed up over medical. So I called him and I said we're going to set it up to brief. I called Dr. Weinberg's secretary and set it up and at 9 o'clock the next morning. And so at 9 o'clock I went by Eugene's and he and I walked down. Elizabeth opened the door for us in Alvin's office and we went in and usual amenities and sat down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But Elizabeth stuck her head in and said Connie's crew got locked in at Y-12, but they are free now and will be here, he said about twenty minutes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: That’s understandable.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: So Alvin said to Eugene, so what are we going to talk about? And Eugene said we, the crew has gotten the answer to the equation but, found the equations to describe EMP.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh huh.
MR. AUXIER: And Alvin nodded and nodded. And he had a little blackboard behind his door, office door. Chalk tray full, little pieces of chalk and Elizabeth had a new box of chalk but he didn't mess with that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: He got a little piece of chalk and he said I guess I'd start to think about Maxwell's equations and wrote an equation. And meantime Eugene had come over and they were standing about this far apart and Eugene said “Hmm”. And he got that same piece of chalk out of Alvin's hand and said, “From hence we'd assume doom, doom, doom”, talking to himself. And he wrote another equation. And Alvin looked at it and said then we'd do this. And he drew it. In five equations they came out with. I'm sitting there with my mouth open--
MR. MCDANIEL: They came out with the answer?
MR. AUXIER: Got the answer, I knew it. In about ten minutes these guys did what three bright people took to two years to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But they did it entirely. That's just one example of the things that they did that kept me in awe at all times.
MR. MCDANIEL: That Weinberg and Wigner were two peas in a pod weren't they?
MR. AUXIER: They were like brothers but I spent a lot more time with Eugene because when he was there that week we would walk up to the cafeteria to eat and we'd talk about things. We played games and we'd try to get him through a door before us, couldn't be done. Anyway, so many things that he could do in his head that people would go off and study these things for long time. They would write papers and when Eugene was thinking he would stand there in front of you and put his hands like this and maybe would close his eyes and his lips would move a little bit. And like we had a little bit of measurement from the Pacific that said there were neutrons out at two thousand, three thousand yards from the bomb.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: From a thermonuclear weapon.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And because of the range of these things it was like two hundred meters, mean free path, means that in about a thousand meters these things were gone, from normal bomb.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But I had been faced with this and I had confidence in the measurements that somebody had made and I was talking to him about it and he said it can't be. Neutrons don't reach out and I said well now remember the bomb goes off, all the air mass in there can interact with the oxygen in close but in a thermonuclear weapon, at the speed of sound we push a mass of this air fast to big distances. And Eugene did this and said well oxygen sixteen is double magic and mumble, mumble, and says your right it can happen. People spent all this time to reach a conclusion that he did in ten seconds.
MR. MCDANIEL: He just sits there and --
MR. AUXIER: just blows your mind away.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what was Weinberg like? That was a good story but what was he like?
MR. AUXIER: He is what I call the ideal kind of scientific leader.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: He picked people to do a job and gave in to them, in my case, a division.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And as long as you did your job right, I mean things when well, he never interfered.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: If you couldn't do your job, you quietly got moved around.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: Very little of that happened because he had really good judgment, he had good associate directors like Liverman, McPherson and these people, who helped pick people. So he, in meantime, was thinking great thoughts and universal thoughts about science, the future, the agroindustrial complex, all these sorts of things. And we were doing, one of the things most divisions, at least in my case, we did our own funding from Washington.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. AUXIER: So the only bad part about that was when the time they came through, ORO, they always milked off a few percent.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. AUXIER: So we were so nearly autonomous but we were still a part of the system and once a year, Alvin Weinberg had every division, had to have a, I forgot what day we called it but an annual review anyway.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And he'd sit in the front row of the auditorium--
MR. MCDANIEL: --auditorium.
MR. AUXIER: And we stood up at the podium in from of him. Most people shaking.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But he was a kind person. I never heard him get after anybody but one but that was neat. And the various research leaders in their divisions got up and made reports.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And the funny thing is that he understood so much that you didn't say and Jake Norfeld, one of our bright guys with theoretical opinion would love to come up with huge equations up there, fill up the screen with equation after equation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: Long and complicated. So he got up there and was doing this and this and said therefore, and he asked for the next slide and Alvin said wait a minute Jake. Back up there, look at that third line up there, isn't that E to the minus. Shouldn't that be a plus? And Jake looked at him and turned white. I mean I couldn't even read the equations that fast.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. AUXIER: As you can tell. I've been awed by both of those guys for their brain power, on the other hand the roles they played in the bigger picture. Like in Alvin managing the lab and Eugene managing various other programs, they were wonders at that. And the last time that I saw Eugene was a Radiation Research meeting in Washington and he and Alvin were both on the stage and Eugene was supposed to give a paper but he was going downhill fast and he couldn't get it to come out right and Alvin came up there beside him and said, I think, Eugene what you mean and then he gave his paper for him.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. AUXIER: And that was the last time I ever saw him. And that was not a good time to see him.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. AUXIER: But I loved them both dearly.
MR. MCDANIEL: Weinberg, from I understand, was, I mean, he had these great revelations about the nuclear industry, about things.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah. The Agroindustrial Complex.
MR. MCDANIEL: Like you said he was the big picture guy, you know and he would think of things that no one else thought of.
MR. AUXIER: And of course you know, I guess you know what happened to him. He was pushing very hard for the Molten Salt Reactors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: The guy at the reactor division in, it was still AEC, or maybe not, and was going for the Fast Breeder Reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, Sure.
MR. AUXIER: And they dig a hole out near K-25 to build the reactor but they never got built.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: But they were like that about that and so Alvin got sent on a mission to Washington.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. AUXIER: And it was. He just got a really bad deal there, smarter than the people that were giving him trouble.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course that’s the way it usually is.
MR. AUXIER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know.
MR. AUXIER: In my mind about all that raft of genius, there was a bunch of them, Eugene and Weinberg were the two of many and never in the history of mankind will ever again get that much brain power to focus on something. It's the fact that Hitler was exterminating Jews. And some of the most brilliant minds were European Jews that came to this country and really a large of the brains in the Manhattan Project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes in advanced science. You know, you know. Absolutely. Well good is there anything else you want to talk about?
MR. AUXIER: I think I've probably worn out your machine.
MR. MCDANIEL: No, not at all, not at all.
MR. AUXIER: No nothing else I can think of.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right. Well John. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us, we certainly appreciate it.
[END OF INTERVIEW]